Artificial intelligence, deep learning, predictive data analytics and robotics have become the ingredients in a recipe designed to significantly improve oil field inspections and make them safer and more efficient.

Avitas Systems -- a GE Venture -- utilizes the various technologies to provide advanced, autonomous inspection management that reportedly can reduce asset downtime and decrease overall inspection time by up to 60 percent. State-of-the-art sensors are attached to robots such as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, robotic crawlers and underwater vehicles and follow precise, pre-set 3-D models to collect inspection data. Inspection specialties include aerial – for assets like flare stacks, ground-based like tanks and pipelines, fugitive methane detection and predictive modeling when it comes to corrosion under insulation.

A cloud-based platform based on GE's Predix, centralizes and stores the data allowing clients to conduct archival searches. Avitas Systems' AI Workbench platform offers data including data from manual and autonomous inspections, regulatory requirements and systems data such as weather and operational data. Its 3-D modeling can develop targeted robotic paths that can be repeated to help detect asset changes over time.

Avitas Systems took a few moments to discuss the technology and its impact on Permian Basin oil operations.

Q. What drove GE to form this venture?

A. GE Ventures identifies, scales and accelerates ideas that will help make the world work better. Innovating the inspection services industry is an opportunity to enhance safety and efficiency in the digital age and put tomorrow's technology to work today.

Q. Are the inspections carried out by Avitas Systems more accurate and/or complete than inspections conducted by humans?

A. Today's manual inspection methods can be inherently unsafe, since they often require workers to enter confined spaces or use ladders, scaffolding, cherry pickers, ropes, and harnesses to inspect. Since our solutions are autonomous, Avitas Systems can target points of inspection from the same distance and angles at a site, even if the inspections are years apart. Consistent and repeatable inspection execution enables change detection over time, and automated defect recognition takes the human subjectivity out of data analysis to ensure accuracy in inspection reports. On 3D models of assets, we can calculate the precise location of anomalies. Correctly identifying the location of anomalies means speedy and cost-effective repair.

That being said, automation and robotics complement the jobs of humans. By introducing automated inspection, Avitas Systems is providing a solution that enhances current inspectors' safety and better equips them to complete inspection jobs in more efficient ways. Avitas Systems can fuse data from existing, traditional sources with data from advanced sensors attached to robots that provide safer ways to collect data.

Q. What barriers would there be for oil and gas companies to utilize this system?

A. We tailor our solutions to the needs of oil and gas companies, so they can utilize any varieties of these technologies. We customize our solutions into "inspection systems." The customized nature of our work leads to efficiency and fewer barriers to improving inspection. And then generally speaking, across industries, Avitas Systems can reduce inspection costs, with savings up to 25 percent and decreased overall inspection time by up to 60 percent over traditional methods.

Q. Specifically to the Permian Basin and its onshore oil and gas facilities, would the drones and/or robot crawlers be utilized?

A. Utilizing robotics, integrated with AI, software, our cloud-based platform, and predictive analytics, we increase safety and efficiency there, too. Our work in the Permian Basin includes efficiently using drones for inspection, for example. We autonomously convert inspection plans with 3D modeling into flight paths for drones to follow and collect data. This process makes data collection easier, versus driving between well pads and manually inspecting them, for example. The site areas are often hot with rugged terrain and other environmental factors – so using these technologies and automating the process is beneficial for inspection.

The Avitas Systems cloud-based platform houses and fuses many types of data, including inspection data from manual and autonomous inspection, regulatory requirements, systems data such as weather, and operational data. That kind of capability prepares us for various kinds of industrial sites.